The Bay Region reconsidered (2006) In Modern Architecture, Kenneth Frampton distinguishes critical regionalism from regionalism as “a spontaneously produced” vernacular. Critical regionalism is intended “to identify those recent regional ‘schools’ whose primary aim has been to reflect and serve the limited constituencies in which they are grounded.” It depends on “a certain prosperity,” Frampton writes, as well as “some kind of anti-centrist consensus, an aspiration at least to some form of cultural, economic, and political independence.” Like Lewis Mumford before him, Frampton counts San Francisco as such a school. Architect and critic Pierluigi Serraino challenges this view. Interested in California’s mid-20th-century modernism and prompted by a suggestion from Elaine Jones to look at the Bay Area, “considered a hotbed of modern architecture in the fifties,” Serraino has written a revisionist history of its postwar period, NorCalMod. Along the way, he also discusses the role of architectural photographers and the design press in drawing attention to architects at the periphery of their editorial vision. Rethinking Bay regionalism Serraino argues that the official history of postwar Bay Regionalism distorts the facts by consciously excluding modernism and its Bay Area exponents. In his view, “the evidence reveals an incohesive chorus of voices, if not an atomized design aesthetic, among Northern California architects during this time.” He concludes that, When all these dots are connected, the picture that emerges is rather different, indeed more comprehensive and richer in design vocabulary than one might expect: Northern California was an unrestrained laboratory for Modern architecture, propelled by the explosion of the national economy. Regionalists and modernists alike promoted economy of design, but through profoundly different architectural expressions.
In the early 1980s, I worked with Joseph Esherick on an article in
Space & Society on the evolution of his work. In one of our
conversations, he said to me that he felt that the steady stream of national and international design magazines made it impossible for architects here to avoid the contamination of larger movements, whatever they might be. Does his comment exemplify the anti14
